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That’s the draw behind a new coloring book from researchers at Disney, ETH Zurich and the Swiss university EPFL, reports Kristin Hohenadel for Slate. "Disney Color and Play" takes two-dimensional drawings and crafts them into "three-dimensional" characters that appear to stand and even move when viewed through a tablet computer.

When someone holds the tablet above the drawing as the child colors, Hohenadel writes, the computer-generated model gains color and texture — based on algorithms that interpret the colored lines. The program can also guess what the "back" of a drawing of, say, a cartoon elephant, might look like based on a kid’s choices for the front, explains John Brownlee for Fast Company.